Afghanistan and Beyond
Adam Jones
An accounting of the sheer scale and continuity and consequences of American imperial violence is our elite’s most enduring taboo.
John Pilger (2001)
On 11 September 2001, terrorism and mass murder struck the West as never before. The destruction of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon constituted a symbolic as well as substantive assault on US power and Western-dominated global capitalism. This chapter argues that the attacks came as a boon to the Bush administration, permitting the most uninhibited campaign of geopolitical expansion and military build-up in decades. The goal, according to Breyten Breytenbach, ‘is obvious: subjugating the world … to U.S. power for the sake of America’s interests’ (Breytenbach, 2002). Anatol Lieven of Washington’s Carnegie Endowment is equally blunt: the Bush administration’s goal is nothing short of ‘unilateral domination through absolute military superiority’ (cited in Chomsky, 2002).1 William Pfaff points to the ‘attempt to impose a new order on international society through military force and political and economic pressures’ (Pfaff, 2002). For Susan Sontag, the ‘war against terror’ has ‘no foreseeable end…. That is one sign that it is not a war but, rather, a mandate for expanding the use of American power’ indefinitely (Sontag, 2002).2
An early step along the path to the new Pax Americana was the ferocious assault, in October and November 2001, upon the ramshackle, almost defenseless country of Afghanistan, its armed forces, and its civilian population. Thousands of civilians were likely killed directly by US forces during the extensive bombing campaign. Those same forces may also have been complicit – or at the very least criminally negligent – in one of the worst genocidal massacres of recent years, that of Taliban (mostly non-Afghan) prisoners captured by the Northern Alliance after the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif. In addition, many thousands – possibly tens of thousands – of Afghans died unknown and unrecorded during the winter of 2001–02. A focus on humanitarian assistance, such as aid organizations were pleading for, might well have saved them. The fighting and massive population movements further disrupted harvests in 2002, leading aid agencies to warn of a renewed crisis for the winter of 2002–03, as this book went into production.
Postwar reports from Afghanistan speak of fragile or nonexistent security for the vast majority of the population, with only Kabul an island of relative calm. Even the lot of that sector of the Afghan population used above all others to justify the ‘humanitarian’ intervention, Afghan women, has hardly changed for the overwhelming majority (Constable, 2002). Politically, the brutal and reactionary centralized rule of the Taliban has been replaced by the brutal and reactionary decentralized rule of the warlords, with the US taking sides and sending in B-52s as deemed necessary. Back to the future we may be headed: ‘the last time [the warlords] were in charge the country slipped into a horrid civil war to which the hand-chopping, head-chopping Taliban were the puritanical solution.’ So noted Peter Maass in the New York Times Magazine (Maass, 2002), adding that while ‘the destruction of the Taliban has made the United States a safer country, … the same cannot be said for Afghanistan.’ Whether even the security of ordinary Americans has benefited, as Maass claims, is highly questionable. Americans now must concern themselves not just with al-Qaeda’s machinations, but with the ardent desire of their own government to strip them of constitutional protections and expose them to an apparatus of surveillance and snooping that makes Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four read more and more like today’s news dispatches.
Targeting Afghanistan
It is unfortunate but probably true that we will never know the full scale of the deaths from starvation and disease that have occurred in Afghanistan since the Allied attack was launched. What evidence there is, though, suggests deaths almost certainly in the thousands, and very likely the tens of thousands:
[From the BBC:] Tens of thousands of people face starvation this winter in western Afghanistan – despite a huge international aid effort. About seven million people depend on aid in Afghanistan – but the disruption to supplies during last year’s fighting broke a vulnerable food chain. The worst affected area is the mountainous province of Badghis, in western Afghanistan…. Some villagers … have died of hunger or related diseases … families have resorted to selling their own daughters for grain…. The only answer for Oxfam is to pump in more food to fill the backlog. They lost three months during the fighting and in that vacuum people died. (Lyon, 2002)
While the West celebrates the surrender of Kandahar and the collapse of the Taliban, here in Maslakh camp in western Afghanistan there is no celebratory slaughtering of goats or distribution of sweets, but only weeping and funerals…. Every night as the temperature dips well below zero, as many as 40 people die from cold and starvation [about the death-toll of the World Trade Center attacks every two-and-a-half months; other media sources claimed up to 100 a day were dying]. In the six cemeteries scattered through the camp, many of the piles of stones marking graves are so tiny that it is clear most victims are children and babies…. ‘The world made us lots of promises,’ Ismail Khan, the Governor of Herat, told The Telegraph. ‘Now people are dying and it has no excuse not to act.’ (Lamb, 2001; see also The Economist, 2001; Fassihi, 2001; Waldman, 2001)
Starvation was no longer a threat – it was a daily reality. Every week, through the month of November [2001] and into December … more than a hundred people in [the district of] Abdulgan died of malnutrition…. They died because they were trapped by nature and politics and war…. Eventually, through a massive effort that included some 400 donkeys, several of whom froze to death during the journey, the International Relief [sic: Rescue] Committee brought supplies of wheat to the people of Abdulgan. When the relief workers arrived, they found a scene of complete devastation, village after village filled with the dead and dying…. The total number of dead over the last few months [in Abdulgan district alone] has to run into the thousands. (Finkel, 2002)
A recent assessment of the population in the Sar-e-Pol camp in Afghanistan shows a dramatic situation. There are more children in feeding centers than ever before. The number of severely malnourished have increased. Mortality rates have doubled … The food crisis in northern Afghanistan is reaching alarming proportions [February 2002]…. [A] concerted effort is needed from the international community to avert a disaster…. ‘We are getting increasingly frustrated with the promises of the international community,’ concludes MSF’s [Médecins Sans Frontières’s] Christopher Stokes. ‘All the talk of world leaders, donor countries and international organizations of their commitment to the Afghan people, translate into little for many people in remote areas. In northern Afghanistan, a new disaster is in the making and can only be averted by immediate and unrestrained action.’ (Médecins Sans Frontières, 2002)
The link between the problems of aid supply and the bombing campaign against Afghanistan is a truism. As early as 8 October 2001, ‘leading British aid agencies’ warned that ‘the launching of military attacks on Afghanistan will worsen the humanitarian crisis in the country’; a representative of Christian aid, Daleep Mukherjee, noted that ‘any offensive military action or threat of military action makes it impossible to deliver’ the necessary security conditions for aid supplies; a spokesperson for the Catholic charity Cafod emphasized (in the reporter’s paraphrase) that ‘launching air strikes while the borders were still closed would leave people who were already starving stranded without access to aid’ (Steele and Lawrence, 2001).3 On 12 October 2001, the Guardian reported that ‘aid agencies face a race against time to get sufficient stockpiles of food into the country. It is a race they look almost certain to lose as long as the bombing continues’ (Kelso and McCarthy, 2001, emphasis added). A few days later, a representative of Oxfam stated that ‘It is now evident that we cannot, in reasonable safety, get food to hungry Afghan people. We’ve reached the point where it is simply unrealistic for us to do our job in Afghanistan. We’ve run out of food, the borders are closed, we can’t reach our staff, and time’s running out’ (Oxfam, 2001).
One of the most cynical assaults on the humanitarian well-being of the Afghan population was the US decision, a scant five days after the 11 September attacks, to demand that Pakistan ‘eliminat[e] … truck convoys that provide much of the food and other supplies to Afghanistan’s civilian population.’ Meanwhile, ‘the threat of military strikes … forced the removal of international aid workers that crippled the assistance program.’ This according to Noam Chomsky, who added that it ‘looks like what’s happening is some sort of silent genocide’ (Chomsky, 2001).4
A key additional factor in the suffering was the willful destruction of what political stability existed in Afghanistan under the Taliban – a grim and repressive stability, to be sure, but one that in key respects was preferable to the chaotic situation that ensued during and after the Taliban’s fall from power. With the central government destroyed and the writ of its interim replacement barely extending beyond Kabul, the ancient phenomenon of warlordism reasserted itself, with Allied acquiescence and often enthusiastic assistance. According to Norah Niland, a worker at the UN coordinating office for Afghanistan, ‘continuing volatility and insecurity have drastically curtailed aid agency plans to redeploy international staff and scale up outreach programs before winter generates its own set of problems’ (quoted in Karacs, 2001). Mark Bartolini of the International Rescue Committee claimed that ‘we’re probably operating at 20 per cent of what we could be, due to security problems’ (quoted in Bowman and Gamerman, 2001). Typical was the situation in the predominantly Pashtun areas of Afghanistan seized by the victorious Northern Alliance, which proceeded to inflict ‘serious abuse, including beatings, killings, rapes, and widespread looting’ on the civilian population,5 without any known efforts by the Allies to restrain their surrogates. The Baltimore Sun quoted Kenneth Bacon of Refugees International as saying that ‘The Taliban didn’t interfere with efforts to deliver food to the neediest people. In a strange way, food delivery to parts of the country is more difficult now than it was under the Taliban, and there’s no excuse for that’ (quoted in Bowman and Gamerman, 2001). A story in the Denver Post stated that ‘since the warlords took over Jalalabad … many homes are being raided by mysterious gunmen … [who] grab every penny and every scrap of food.’ ‘At least under the Taliban there was no robbery,’ an Afghan told the Post’s reporter. ‘People were feeling hopeful when the US bombed,’ another commented. ‘But it’s gotten even worse. If Bush wants to remove terrorists, why does he not remove them from this place?’ (quoted in Seibert, 2001).
Aside from the intentional exacerbation of the humanitarian crisis, a range of criminal actions, either direct or indirect, can be imputed to Allied (notably US) forces in the Afghanistan campaign:
State terrorism The US Federal Bureau of Investigation defines terrorism as ‘the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives’ (cited in Cryan, 2001). In this light, what is one to make of the following report, issued prior to the fall of Kandahar to Northern Alliance forces?
Around-the-clock bombing raids designed to shatter the nerves and morale of the people of Kandahar have produced a kind of mass nervous breakdown, according to refugees fleeing the besieged Taliban stronghold. ‘It was like being inside a nightmare,’ said a man who arrived at the Pakistan border yesterday. ‘Everyone was crying. There were dead people everywhere.’ … Most terrifying of all … have been the Daisy Cutter bombs, which produce colossal, bone-shaking explosions and level everything around with a lethal hail of explosive shrapnel. The refugees said they had no idea how many people have been killed in the raids, except that the number was extremely high. The relentless bombing raids have had a devastating psychological effect. Many refugees said people in Kandahar were reduced to a state of panic, frantically trying to find a place where they would be safe, or fleeing to the Pakistan border. (Cheney, 2001, emphases added)
Marc Herold’s ‘accounting’ of civilian victims of the assault on Afghanistan (see below) also notes that the bombing campaign ‘contributed to wholesale panic amongst residents of villages and cities, leading to floods of refugees seeking to escape’ – up to 80 per cent of the population of Kabul and Kandahar, for example (Herold, 2001). It is hard not to agree with Mahajan, who calls the protracted bombing of Afghanistan ‘one of the most shameful spectacles in modern history, [as] the richest and most powerful nation on earth pounded one of the poorest, most desolate nations on earth for months while proclaiming its virtue to the world’ (Mahajan, 2002: 98).
Large-scale killing of civilians There is little doubt, at the time of writing, that more – perhaps many more – civilians have been directly killed in the ‘war on terror’ than died in the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks combined. The most substantial single exploration of the issue is the ‘Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States’ Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan’ prepared by Professor Marc Herold of the Whittemore School of Business and Economics at the University of New Hampshire. Herold at first documented a total of 3,767 civilians deaths in the first two-and-a-half months of the US air campaign against Afghanistan, later revising his total slightly downwards, to ‘3000 to 3600’ (Mahajan, 2002: 48). The toll could be ascribed, according to Herold, to ‘the apparent willingness of US military strategists to fire missiles into, and drop bombs upon, heavily populated areas of Afghanistan…. [T]he critical element remains the very low value put upon Afghan civilian lives by US military planners and the political elite.’ In Herold’s view, ‘There is no difference between the attacks upon the WTC whose primary goal was the destruction of a symbol, and the US-UK revenge coalition bombing of military targets located in populated urban areas. Both are criminal. Slaughter is slaughter’ (Herold, 2001).6
Attempts to establish accurately the scale of civilian deaths in the campaign have been hampered by the deliberate obstruction of the US government, which decided, in October 2001, to ‘spen[d] millions of dollars to prevent western media from seeing highly accurate civilian satellite pictures of the effects of bombing in Afghanistan.’ The decision was taken ‘after reports of heavy civilian casualties from the overnight bombing of training camps near Darunta, north-west of Jalalabad’ (Campbell, 2001).
Attacks on civilian infrastructure In November 2001, the UK Independent reported UN warnings of a ‘disaster of tremendous proportions’ following the US bombing (in seven separate raids) of a hydroelectric plant near the Kajakai dam in South Afghanistan:
UN officials say that the loss of electricity will increase the suffering of civilians in southern Afghanistan, which has already suffered massive damage from American air raids. They fear that further air raids risk destroying the dam itself, with catastrophic consequences for the region…. [According to a UN report,] ‘If the dam collapses the whole Helmand valley would be flooded, risking the life of tens of thousands of people in addition to destroying the lands benefiting around 500,000 people (and feeding around 1,000,000 people).’ (Parry 2001)
Fortunately for the civilian population, the dam was never breached; but unless total incompetence reigned, the repeated attacks close to the barrier were carried out in the knowledge that they could, and perhaps in the expectation that they would, lead to a humanitarian disaster (which in a domestic setting would qualify as criminal negligence, if not attempted murder), and that the obliteration of electrical power for an entire region would cause large-scale civilian suffering. It is worth remembering that the Nazi stooge Arthur Seyss-Inquhart was tried and executed after World War II for atrocities that included breaching dykes in the Netherlands.
Other examples of attacks on civilian infrastructure are cited by Herold in his accounting of civilian deaths in Afghanistan. Certain ‘US bombing target hits are impossible to “explain” in terms other than the US seeking to inflict maximum pain upon Afghan society and perceived “enemies” … [these include] the Kabul telephone exchange, the Al Jazeera Kabul office, trucks and buses filled with fleeing refugees, and the numerous attacks upon civilian trucks carrying fuel oil. Indeed, the bombing of Afghan civilian infrastructure parallels that of the Afghan civilian’ (Herold, 2001).
Mistreatment of prisoners-of-war Reports of abuses against prisoners-of-war, including mass killings (discussed further below), circulated in the final days of the war and continued to emerge in 2002. In late December 2001, the Guardian reported that ‘Afghanistan’s new authorities are brutalising Taliban and al-Qaida prisoners to soften them up before handing them to American forces’; guards ‘admitted … that they routinely tortured inmates during interrogations to extract information, which was given to American officials trying to identify suspects to be prosecuted in the US’ (Carroll, 2001). Almost exactly a year later, evidence surfaced that prisoners held at the Bagram air base for transfer to detention facilities at the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, were being exposed to CIA ‘stress and duress’ techniques similar to the techniques inflicted upon Irish detainees and prisoners in the UK during the torture controversy of the 1970s (see Conroy, 2001). In a letter to President Bush, Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, described prisoners kept ‘standing or kneeling for hours,’ held in ‘awkward, painful positions’ and deprived of sleep – methods that in the view of Roth’s organization ‘would place the United States in violation of some of the most fundamental prohibitions of international human rights law.’ The US was also accused of turning prisoners over to the intelligence services of countries notorious for their routine use of torture – another ‘violation of international law,’ this time ‘complicit[y] in torture committed by other governments,’ according to Roth (see Cooperman, 2002). At the Afghan jail of Shebarghan, meanwhile, the US was ‘accused of openly flouting the Geneva Conventions’ by ‘washing its hands’ of responsibility for conditions at the jail, which the US originally ‘helped to operate’ and then turned over to one of its favorite warlords, General Abdul Rashid Dostum. The US was now expressing hopes that ‘humanitarian groups and charities will step in and improve the conditions at the jail, where 3,300 prisoners are squeezed together in grossly overcrowded, unsanitary cells, and where many have already died from disease.’ Leonard Rubinstein, a representative of a Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) delegation that toured the prison, stated: ‘The information is that the Pentagon is doing nothing for the conditions at the prison. That is a decision that has been taken at four-star general level.’ Under the Geneva Convention, the PHR claimed, the US was still responsible for the appalling conditions: ‘This obligation exists irrespective [of] whether the US physically captured the prisoners, whether it currently has custody of them, or whether the detained individuals are considered prisoners of war of the US.’ Another member of the delegation, Dr Jennifer Leaning, said: ‘We are dealing with a quiet atrocity. These men are ordinary Taliban soldiers. The US has led, controlled and organized this war – [it] understands the situation and is responsible’ (quoted in Buncombe, 2002).7
Srebrenica in Afghanistan? Only subsequently, however, did it become clear that those who survived to endure the horrors of Shebarghan were the lucky ones, at least temporarily. There is now little doubt that massive atrocities occurred against prisoners who were supposedly being transferred to the prison. A combination of murder through asphyxiation and extrajudicial execution seems to have resulted in a slaughter of defenseless detainees that, if it did not match the 7,000 Bosnian men and boys exterminated at Srebrenica in July 1995, was of a similar order of magnitude. According to Jamie Doran, producer of a shocking documentary titled Massacre at Mazar, thousands of Taliban prisoners – ‘young men who had expected the protection of the Geneva conventions’ after surrendering to US and US-backed forces – had ‘instead died horribly, either from suffocation [in container trucks] or by summary execution.’ Thousands more were missing after the surrender of the fortress of Kunduz. ‘Over 5,000 are missing. A few may have escaped; others may have bought their freedom while more may have been sold to the security agencies of their countries, to return to a terrible fate. But according to a number of eyewitnesses found during a six-month investigation, most lie in the sand’ at Dasht Leili, a site only ten minutes’ drive from Shebarghan’s gates (Doran, 2002).
Doran goes further still, claiming that US soldiers were present when the death containers were opened, and ordered the destruction of the ghastly evidence:
When the containers were finally opened, a mess of urine, blood, faeces, vomit and rotting flesh was all that remained…. As the containers were lined up outside the prison, a soldier accompanying the convoy was present when the prison commanders received orders to dispose of the evidence quickly: ‘Most of the containers had bullet holes. In each container maybe 150–160 had been killed. Some were still breathing, but most were dead. The Americans told the Shebarghan people to get them outside the city before they were filmed by satellite.’ (Doran, 2002, emphasis added)
As Doran notes, ‘This accusation about US involvement will be crucial to any inquiry: international, and national, civil and military law relies on establishing the chain of command under which crimes took place. It is a matter of determining who was running the show at Shebarghan’ (Doran, 2002, emphasis added). There is strong prima facie evidence that the US was in fact ‘running the show’ – at least in the sense that Israeli forces were directing events when they ushered their Christian Phalangist allies into the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in 1982, with consequences that are both widely known and still emerging (see Fisk, 2001). Newsweek’s detailed investigation of ‘The Death Convoy of Afghanistan’ stated straightforwardly that ‘American forces were working intimately with “allies” who committed what could well qualify as war crimes’ (Dehghanpisheh et al., 2002).
Witness testimony has also alleged that ‘600 Taliban PoWs who survived the containers’ shipment to the Shebarghan prison … were taken to a spot in the desert and executed in the presence of about 30 to 40 US specialforces soldiers’ (Kirschbaum, 2002, emphasis added), while others involved themselves enthusiastically and directly in the ‘dirty work’ of prisoner torture and disposal of corpses:
Even for those who survived the journey … to Shiberghan prison, their fate at the hands of American soldiers was hardly more merciful than death in the desert, according to eyewitnesses. One soldier recounted an incident when a US soldier murdered a Taliban prisoner in order to frighten the others into talking: ‘When I was a soldier at Shebarghan, I saw an American soldier breaking a prisoner’s neck. Another time, they poured acid or something on them. The Americans did whatever they wanted; we had no power to stop them. Everything was under the control of the American commander.’ A general in the Northern Alliance, also stationed at Shebarghan at the time, claimed: ‘I was a witness. I saw them [US soldiers] stab their legs, cut their tongues, cut their hair and cut their beards. Sometimes it looked as if they were doing it for pleasure. They would take a prisoner outside, beat him up and return him to the jail. But sometimes they were never returned and they disappeared, the prisoner disappeared.’ (Doran, 2002, emphasis added)
An integral part of any investigation into these mass killings and other atrocities ought to be the contemporaneous statements of US officials, notably Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who in the waning days of the war appeared to be cheerleading for the slaughter of prisoners. Rumsfeld originally announced that the US was ‘not inclined to negotiate surrenders,’ later ‘clarifying’ his statement by claiming that while Afghan Taliban should be allowed out of the net that was closing around Kunduz, no such treatment could be accorded to foreign fighters: ‘My hope is that they will either be killed or taken prisoner’ (quoted in Mahajan, 2002: 51). In the end, Rumsfeld had the best of both worlds: thousands of men were first taken prisoner and then killed. Something similar appears to have held for the hundreds killed in the alleged ‘uprising’ at Qala-i-Jangi fort near Mazar-i-Sharif. ‘Some reports indicated that hundreds of the dead had their hands tied behind their backs,’ while indiscriminate aerial bombing claimed many more lives (Mahajan, 2002: 52).
’Operation Endless Deployment’
For the Bush administration, the terrorist attacks on American soil were a godsend. They bolstered the president’s legitimacy in the wake of the chaotic 2000 elections; pushed his approval ratings to unheard-of levels; fueled Republican success in the 2002 congressional elections; masked the usual massive tax cuts for the rich; and spurred $600 billion in added military spending – read: subsidies for high-tech and security-related industries – over the next ten years (the US increase in military spending in 2002 was greater than the total military spending of any other state). In global perspective, the 11 September attacks permitted the most ambitious expansion of US imperial power since at least the early 1980s, and perhaps since the 1950s.8 Hartung et al. refer to it as ‘Operation Endless Deployment’:
Since September 2001 U.S. forces have built, upgraded or expanded military facilities in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Turkey, Bulgaria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan; authorized extended training missions or open-ended troop deployments in Djibouti, the Philippines and the former Soviet republic of Georgia; negotiated access to airfields in Kazakhstan; and engaged in major military exercises, involving thousands of US personnel, in Jordan, Kuwait and India…. These forward bases, many of which have been arranged through secretive, ad hoc arrangements, currently house an estimated 60,000 personnel [as of October 2002]…. Funds for training and military aid, which are often used to grease the wheels of U.S. access to overseas military facilities, have been increased substantially since the start of the Administration’s war on terrorism. The budget request for training foreign military personnel is up by 27 per cent in the fiscal-year 2003 budget, while funding for the government’s largest military aid program, Foreign Military Financing, is slated to top $4 billion. The bulk of this additional funding is going to countries like Uzbekistan, Pakistan and India [and Colombia], which had previously been under restrictions on what they could receive from the United States because of records of systematic human rights abuses, antidemocratic practices or development of nuclear weapons. Now these same nations are viewed as indispensable allies in the Administration’s war on terrorism…. In a mid-August [2002] briefing, Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of the Central Command, suggested that the length of the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan could end up rivaling the fifty-year U.S. presence in South Korea. And if the Bush Administration is not dissuaded from moving full-speed ahead with its plans to invade Iraq, several independent military experts have suggested that an occupying force of 75,000–100,000 troops may be needed to stabilize that country, giving rise to the need for additional formal or informal bases to house U.S. troops. (Hartung et al., 2002)
Who, a decade ago, would have imagined US and Allied troops on the territory of the republics of former Soviet Central Asia? What other pretext than the ‘war on terror’ could have been found to extend weaponry and training to countries as diverse as the Philippines, Georgia, Yemen, Indonesia, and Colombia – in fact, just about any country that asks for such ‘aid’ or can be pressured into accepting it? It seems every week brings news of a fresh element in the equation. In December 2002, the United States announced a beefed-up alliance with Algeria, consistently one of the world’s leading purveyors of domestic terrorism over the last two decades (100–150,000 killed in its civil war, very likely two-thirds of them by the state). ‘Washington has much to learn from Algeria on ways to fight terrorism,’ William Burns, the Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, announced sagely. Thus, ‘We are putting the finishing touches to an agreement to sell Algeria military equipment to fight terrorism. These steps aim at intensifying the security cooperation between the two countries.’ The aid will go primarily to an army which one prominent defector charges with ‘killing indiscriminately’ and ‘exterminat[ing] anyone who supports the Islamists, not just terrorists’ (Tremlett, 2002). Once again, then, a Western power has become a supporter of state terrorism in Algeria – reminding us of an earlier generation of battles against ‘rebels’ and ‘terrorists,’ detailed in this volume by Raphaëlle Branche.9 And another country receives a blank cheque for any future repression, so long as it can be justified by the fight against terror – and what cannot be?
Although it is secondary to this volume’s focus, the domestic implications of the post-September 11 period are central to the overall US project of domination. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet bogey, what but a devastating terrorist attack could have allowed ‘a demented Caesarism’ to take hold in the American republic, ‘such as one would once have found among the Soviets, or as one finds today in places like Zimbabwe, North Korea, Cuba (and Iraq)’ (Miller, 2002)?10 What could have permitted truly ‘astonishing assertion[s]’ of presidential authority like ‘President Bush’s claim of a right to hold any American citizen whom he designates as an “enemy combatant” in military prison indefinitely, without trial and without the right to speak with a lawyer’ (Lewis, 2002)? What could have justified the creation and introduction, ‘with no public notice or debate,’ of ‘the world’s largest computer system and database, one with the ability to track every credit card purchase, travel reservation, medical treatment and common transaction by every citizen in the United States’?
This last reference is to the ‘Total Information Awareness’ system, which professor of constitutional law Jonathan Turley describes as the realization of ‘the dream of every petty despot in history: the ability to track citizens in real time and to reconstruct their associations and interests.’ The system is to be run by an ‘Information Awareness Office’ (a masterpiece of Newspeak: ‘who could be against greater awareness of information?,’ asks Turley), headed by none other than John Poindexter, a key figure in the 1980s’ conspiracy to ship arms to Iran, a designated terrorist state. Poindexter ‘is the perfect Orwellian figure for the perfect Orwellian project. As a man convicted of falsifying and destroying information [about the Iran-Contra conspiracy], he now will be put in charge of gathering information on every citizen’ (Turley, 2002). Poindexter joined an almost surreal procession of disreputable figures from the Reagan era (Elliot Abrams, John Negroponte, Otto Reich), revived for a new era whose imperial swagger and contempt for the rule of law was doubtless familiar to them (Welch, 2002).11
Targeting Iraq… and Cuba
The September 11 attacks were followed by a tightening of the regime of economic sanctions against Iraq, which, as Denis Halliday argues in this volume, have probably been genocidal in their character and in their impact on the Iraqi population. The conservative Economist reported in January 2002 that
America’s prickly mood has already led to a surge in the number of ‘holds’ put on contracts under the UN’s oil for food program. Some $5 billion in orders, all but a fraction of them intended for humanitarian purposes, now languish undelivered due to American fears that they may serve some military purpose. Meantime, oil prices have fallen 30% since September, and the stringent new mechanism the UN now imposes, whereby prices for Iraqi oil are set retroactively every 15 days, is frightening off customers. The Iraqis’ meagre income, already less than a quarter of pre-Gulf war levels, looks set to shrink even further. (The Economist 2002a, emphasis added)
The San Francisco Chronicle notes that ‘U.N. sources who would not speak for attribution complain that the United States has stood by the strict sanctions in the hope that the Iraqi people will one day rise up against Hussein for causing their suffering’ (Ditmars, 2002). (Article 54 of the 1949 Geneva Convention states that ‘Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited.’)
As work on this chapter was completed, Washington appeared poised to invade Iraq regardless of the outcome of investigations by the UN inspectors ushered back into Iraq in November 2002. It was even possible that the war (or a subsequent campaign against North Korea) could feature the first use of nuclear weapons since 1945. A report by Michael Gordon of the New York Times described ‘the Pentagon’s new blueprint on nuclear forces’ as ‘cit[ing] the need for new nuclear arms that could have a lower yield and produce less nuclear fallout…. The targets might be situated in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya or North Korea…. Critics fear that by calling for the development of more effective nuclear weapons, the Pentagon is making the unthinkable thinkable, blurring the distinction between nuclear weapons and conventional arms’ (Gordon, 2002).12
It can at least be said that if nuclear weapons are used in the war on (of?) terror, there will be no shortage of pundits in the United States willing to praise the decision. In a hair-raising compendium of media commentary after the September 11 attacks, FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) cited statements like the following:
The response to this unimaginable 21st-century Pearl Harbor should be as simple as it is swift – kill the bastards. A gunshot between the eyes, blow them to smithereens, poison them if you have to. As for cities or countries that host these worms, bomb them into basketball courts. (Steve Dunleavy of the New York Post)
If we flatten part of Damascus or Tehran or whatever it takes, that is part of the solution. (Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review)
TIME TO TAKE NAMES AND NUKE AFGHANISTAN. (Caption to Gary Brookins’ cartoon in the Richmond Times-Dispatch)
At a bare minimum, tactical nuclear capabilities should be used against the bin Laden camps in the desert of Afghanistan. To do less would be rightly seen by the poisoned minds that orchestrated these attacks as cowardice on the part of the United States and the current administration. (Thomas Woodrow, formerly of the Defense Intelligence Agency)
This is no time to be precious about locating the exact individuals directly involved in this particular terrorist attack…. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity [!]. We weren’t punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That’s war. (Ann Coulter, syndicated columnist; see Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting 2002)
Other countries were in the gunsights, including most obviously Iraq, as well as North Korea, Iran, and another longtime US irritant – Fidel Castro’s Cuba. In a blinding flash of hypocrisy, Cuba was added to the US list of states supporting terrorism – after decades in which Cuba was on the receiving end of probably the most sustained international terrorist campaign of the twentieth century, at US hands. In a March 2002 speech, President Castro stated:
The government of the United States should ask Cuba for forgiveness for the thousands of acts of aggression, sabotage and terrorism committed against our country for 43 years…. The US government will never have the moral authority to combat terrorism while it continues to use such practices against nations like Cuba … when thousands of Cubans have died as victims of terrorism from the US and not one US citizen has suffered the least scratch nor has one screw even been affected by any action of such a nature by Cuba.
The ban on shipments of food and medicine under the economic embargo constituted, Castro argued, ‘acts of genocide’ against the Cuban people. The US, he added, ‘should renounce its policy of world domination, stop intervening in other countries, respect the United Nations’ authority and comply with international treaties it signed.’ The Associated Press dispatch from which these quotations are drawn was headlined, ‘Castro Oozes Anti-US Rhetoric…’ (Cawthorne, 2002). (Oozes like a slug, perhaps?) A more apt title would have been, ‘Castro Makes Some Telling Points.’
While the propaganda campaign against Cuba swelled, a more practical campaign of many years’ standing was further expanded. It aimed to secure the release from prison and/or the pardon of a host of ‘militant Cuban exiles convicted of terrorist offenses.’ As detailed in Cuba Confidential by Ann Louise Bardach (Bardach, 2002), George W., his brother Jeb, and George Bush Sr. have all played roles in releasing notorious terrorist individuals. For example,
at the request of Jeb, Mr. Bush Sr. intervened to release the convicted Cuban terrorist Orlando Bosch from prison and then granted him U.S. residency. According to the Justice Department in George Bush Sr.’s administration, Bosch had participated in more than 30 terrorist acts. He was convicted of firing a rocket into a Polish ship which was on passage to Cuba. He was also implicated in the 1976 blowing-up of a Cubana plane flying to Havana from Venezuela in which all 73 civilians on board were killed.
George W., for his part, supplemented his ‘sweep of terrorist suspects’ by approving the freeing from jail of other convicted terrorists (Campbell, 2001). They were released into a South Florida society that surely counts as one of the world’s leading terrorist states-within-a-state. ‘There is no war on terrorism,’ John Pilger wrote contemptuously. ‘If there was, the Royal Marines and the SAS would be storming the beaches of Florida, where more CIA-funded terrorists, ex-Latin American dictators and torturers, are given refuge than anywhere on earth’ (Pilger, n.d.).
This chapter has argued that the US campaign against Afghanistan, far from being motivated by a desire to ‘fight terror,’ was conducted for the principal purpose of expanding US geostrategic and economic power. Despite claims that the interests of Afghan civilians were paramount, they were killed directly and indirectly in their thousands or tens of thousands. Postwar Afghanistan has been left shattered and fragmented, with no indication that the US and its allies are interested in bringing meaningful security to the mass of the population. The campaign will likely serve as a rough guide to its successors. As the gunsights turn to Iraq, for example, there is no hint that negotiations will be preferred to war, or that multilateral mechanisms will exercise effective constraints on US and British policy, or that the consequences for the Iraqi population will be any less devastating than for their Afghan counterparts.
Afterword: censored on H-Genocide
On purely moral grounds, the scale of the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, and the possible destructive impact of the Allied bombing campaign on attempts to ameliorate it, should have been the leading ‘story’ in the news media, and the primary policy consideration for Allied governments. No one not clinically deranged would have expected this to be the case, however. Indeed, the humanitarian equation was shunted to the realm of public-relations operations, such as the US’s derisory dropping of food packets in Northern Alliance-controlled areas as a storm of bombs rained down on Taliban positions and civilian areas. Coverage of the humanitarian crisis was minimal in the US press, though far more extensive in British media. And critics who raised the idea that conditions were grave and the bombing a serious impediment to aid efforts were prone to be ridiculed or silenced outright – as I discovered in October 2001, when I sought on three separate occasions to post messages about the humanitarian situation in Afghanistan to the H-Genocide academic mailing list.
In the first post (12 October 2001), I cited testimony from humanitarian organizations and United Nations staffers to the effect that the bombing campaign against Afghanistan was the major obstacle to the delivery of desperately needed food aid to the Afghan civilian population. I asked: ‘If coalition leaders are aware of the present situation, as most of the major humanitarian agencies and international media appear to be, and choose to continue the bombing in coming weeks … could any resulting largescale mortality legitimately be termed genocidal?’13 I did not myself offer an answer to the question, but no matter: all three posts were rejected by the H-Genocide editorial board. As the list editor stated in response to the second attempted post (22 October), the ‘overwhelming opinion’ of the board ‘was that we were not going to publish a message that escalated the human tragedy that is developing to the status of genocide. This was seen … [as] a rather large error’, despite the mandate of the mailing list to ‘make every effort to encourage a free exchange of ideas,’ and the fact that the state’s role in committing genocide through famine has been a regular theme of the recent genocide literature, in the context of Stalin’s USSR, Mao’s China, and Mengistu’s Ethiopia (see, e.g., Conquest, 1986; Dolot, 1985). ‘There seems to me a fundamental question to be asked here,’ I wrote in the third and last of the rejected posts. ‘Is it up to the list editors to decide what can legitimately be considered a genocide and which interpretations are “erroneous,” and to accept or reject posts on this basis? Is not the appropriate place to discuss and debate this issue the list itself?’
Apparently not. In my third post, I explicitly requested that the HGenocide board provide me with their reasons for rejecting the posts. Excerpts from correspondence from the board members to the list editor were subsequently forwarded to me. In them, board members referred to me as ‘a loose cannon’ whose writings were ‘libelous and disgraceful’ and evoked ‘anger and revulsion’; and as someone who taught at a ‘hot-bed of anti-American and anti-Western thought’ (a patently absurd description of my current institution, CIDE, in Mexico City). One board member accused me of ‘terrorist apologism [of the type] that is unfortunately becoming popular among the enemies of this great country’ (i.e. the United States, where eight out of nine members of the editorial board were based); another claimed that I was ‘simply sophomoric or … intentionally manipulative.’ The extraordinary venom and ad hominem character of these responses, I wrote at the time, testified to ‘the politically-inspired censorship of alternative views’ and ‘the “chill” that has descended over political discussion and debate in the United States, and elsewhere, since the atrocities of September 11.’ In my case, the chill only deepened: in February 2002, I was banned from posting to the H-Genocide list, an editorial-board decision that was formalized (and made permanent) in September of the same year. Subsequently even my right to receive postings by other list members was withdrawn.
In the introduction to this book, I suggested that the genocide-studies community has generally been more willing than others in the social sciences to acknowledge, or at least explore, the Western role in genocide and crimes against humanity. The actions of the H-Genocide editorial board, however – to the limited but not insignificant extent that they can be considered representative of the genocide-studies community as a whole – suggest that constraints remain, and may in fact have increased in the wake of 11 September. The community may still be less prone than others to substitute unthinking patriotism or outright jingoism for reasoned analysis. But it is hardly immune to the temptation.
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